


The Death of Memory

by midnightflame



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Again it's not the sexual kind, Asphyxiation, Dark Shiro (Voltron), Established Relationship, Implied Relationships, Implied Sexual Content, Keith desperately wants to see Shiro again, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-13
Updated: 2017-04-13
Packaged: 2018-10-18 06:16:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10610979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightflame/pseuds/midnightflame
Summary: When Shiro is rescued again from Galra hands, it's not the man they all remembered. But Keith remembers everything about them, and he's certain Shiro still does as well.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Yet another 'hey this sounds awesome and I seriously want to write it' piece inspired by stuff talked about on Twitter. There are definitely some people to blame for this, but I loved the whole of this idea so I'm not sorry and I love them both for putting it out there.

There is a firestorm in his throat. It burns, and it burns, devouring his breath, the flicker of its flames telling him that there is nothing more of life for him here, that everything he has ever wanted has fallen away and it will sit as cold as bones beneath the earth.

That there will be no one to pray for them. Just another two souls lost to the greater war waged.

“Shiro. . .”

A word that lifts itself from the embers. As his gaze locks onto Shiro’s, watching as the electric yellow of quintessence swirls like smoke in the grey of his eyes, Keith feels the corners of his mouth pulling upward. The hand on his throat pulses, tightening with the beat of a heart Keith still recognizes.

“I remember. . .”

*

He doesn’t speak. Instead, he just sits there, with the sort of grin that talks about slitting your throat rather than wanting to see happiness curl around you like a well-worn sweatshirt. This wide, lethal pull of lips that puts the knife right into Keith’s heart, because it doesn’t belong on Shiro. But there’s a lot that doesn’t belong on Shiro right now, like the tattered remnants of Galran prisoner wear, or the scars that are still sitting fresh in their making, edges a bit raw, too pink to be called anything but tender.

And then there’s that unnerving yellow edge to his irises, telling them all that there are things flowing in Shiro’s blood that never should have been put there, but there it is, bright and undeniable. It flares up at times, swallowing the grey whole only to recede like the tide, ebbing and flowing in the aftermath of whatever had caused it to riot in the first place. When the quiet settles back in however, Keith notes that the yellow glows in a thin line, an outer ring orbiting Shiro’s pupil, hovering in a place it has no right belonging.

He curls a hand around one of the metal bars barricading Shiro’s cell. Nothing stirs within it. There is only that grin and that gaze boring into the very depths of him.

A look that would eat a man alive if he let it.

“You know, I thought you were the biggest piece of shit when we first met.”

The smallest tug of a smile surfaces on his lips then, as memory starts to play like some beloved flipbook in his head. Image after image jumping to life only to be left pages behind as the next one rolls in. One following the other in a sequence that makes perfect sense to him. The replay of a life once begun anew and now threatening to end.

“Everything about you was too perfect. Top student. Top pilot. Always willing to give a hand when needed. . .You just didn’t give up.”

_You can’t fix everything, Keith. But it doesn’t mean you should stop working on the things you can._

His grip loosens around the bar, hand sinking into the spaces between until it hangs over the edge. Fingers flutter, one after the other in slow succession, and a laugh puffs up and out of his throat. 

“I still remember how much it stung when I hit you that first time. And like the complete asshole I thought you were, you just lifted your hand up to your jaw and smiled at me. You fucking _smiled_ at me, and said. . .“ He stops for a moment, as the memory starts playing again in his head. And for one brief moment, he swears he can feel the pain still ringing across his knuckles. With the flick of his tongue across his lips, he continues, “You said that’s not how you hit a guy if you mean it.”

At the time, he thought he had meant it. Honestly and truly did, but like so many other things in his life, he realized Shiro had been right.

There had been nothing honest in that hit.

Keith sinks down into a squat, putting himself level with Shiro. The yellow in his eyes is dancing, spiking like soundwaves across the screen with peaks crashing themselves against the black of Shiro’s pupil and cascading back down like the remnants of fireworks blown up against the night sky. Over and over again, this frenzied bit of reaction to each word Keith lets drop from his lips. 

It makes him want to hope. Makes him think that maybe the strings around them have simply gotten tangled, but that the knife hadn’t been taken to them yet. 

That there is still enough red binding them to make this possible.

“I still can’t believe I nailed you for telling me I was better than what those other kids were saying. I think I just needed to take something out on the world, and when I looked at you. . .” A pause as the smile starts to die on his lips. Fingers curl in against the cool metal of the cell’s door. “. . .when I looked at you, Shiro, I felt like you could handle everything that I was.”

“I can still handle you.”

Keith’s hand clamps down, sudden and fierce as a crocodile’s bite and sending pain cutting across his palm. It’s Shiro’s voice, low and measured, with just enough warmth in it to put the ache into Keith’s heart and have his memories rushing through the pages until there is nothing but the flash of skin, the tingle of touch remembered, the parting of lips as words tumbled free and sacred between their bodies. Every image succumbing to the darkness of his mind, submerged once more in memory. 

But every ounce of him remembers those moments, and with one look at Shiro, he knows that the man sitting across from him remembers them too. 

“You’re not the one capable of that,” Keith forces out, words dry and cracked as desert dirt too long beneath the sun. 

There is hunger in Shiro’s gaze, but none of the fondness. Nothing of love. Only a promise of ritual violence, the sort that would still drag cries from his lips, still have him screaming Shiro’s name, still marking him as a man taken. The sort of love that would leave him emptied out, a shell set for crushing. 

And love with Shiro had never been anything like that. 

Laughter fills the cell at those words, at the look Keith had been wearing in those moments (and he knows it must have been nothing but absolute anguish because there’s a hollowness haunting his heart and he doesn’t know how to exorcise it right now). The grin cuts sharp over Shiro’s lips once more; yellow consumes grey. 

“The guy inside of here tells me I am.”

*

It becomes habit. Keith gets breakfast, then heads to the holding cell. Shiro – or Kuro as Keith has come to call him in his head – finds some way to goad him, ripping into his memories until the only thing left is to renounce whatever ties Keith still tried to retain between them. And it almost always comes with the sound of laughter, cold and clear, drenching him with a misery just as icy and cutting as rain in mid-winter.

He leaves. He trains. He gets lunch and trains again. Follows with dinner, then it’s back to the cell. 

Conversations are easier at night, Keith is finding. And he wants to think it’s because whatever is left of Shiro remembers how the evenings were always theirs. 

“Do you remember that night you took me out to see the stars?”

Kuro says nothing, like always, but he tips his head in Keith’s direction. He’s started listening now, not quite avidly but interested enough, and there’s a part of Keith that thinks this is all in preparation for something far more devastating. Like offering a thread for the pulling and just tug-tug-tugging until the whole thing unravels and there he’ll be, stark naked and defenseless as everything he had ever had falls undone to the ground.

“It was the last day of leave. You didn’t even tell me anything, but as you drove. . .the sky was so clear. There was nothing but stars above us.”

Something else tells Keith that Kuro listens because Shiro listens, and the two are not as inseparable as Kuro likes to boast at times. 

“Thousands of them. . .” he murmurs, voice soft with memory. A smile claims his mouth as Keith tips his head against the bars and slowly shuts his eyes. Letting the darkness swallow him as his mind lights up with the desert sky, all spilled ink with countless diamonds strewn across the mess of the universe. 

It was infinite. 

“You kissed me then. . .”

_We could be infinite too. There’s nothing to limit you, Keith._

The smile grows. Keith has come to learn the subtleties of Shiro’s voice as it interweaves with Kuro’s, laying something gentle and remorseful over the harder edge of Kuro’s words. He hears in it that statement, more fact than fond remembrance, and he keeps his eyes shut because he would rather be at the mercy of it all then decimate the memory with that grin threatening him and those eyes burning with something 'not Shiro'.

“Because you couldn’t bring yourself to do it,” Keith laughs a moment later. “You were just sitting there, with my hand in your lap, playing with my fingers.”

“I was nervous. Didn’t know if I would earn myself another punch. . .”

And that’s the other thing about Kuro – he doesn’t really separate himself from Shiro. Never _he_ , never _him_ , never _someone else_. Always ‘I this’ and ‘I that.' Consistent in moments like this, when everything courts the intimacy that had existed between them, and he thinks it’s because it’s the finest trap Kuro can think of placing before him. That one misstep will send Keith tumbling into a pit of spikes and regret, something he won’t walk away from without a new set of scars to sit as reminders of the mistakes he keeps on making. 

“Yeah. . .well, those nerves made you look. . .”

Silence floods in as Keith opens his eyes and finally takes in the sight of Shiro once again. There’s a smile on his lips that’s not fully kind, more amused with that cutthroat quality to it that tells Keith he’s still bleeding out for his efforts even without falling prey to Kuro’s tactics. 

His gaze drops to his hands, where he’s been spinning his knife round and round ceaselessly since he first sat down outside the cell. The smile on his lips falters, just slightly, just enough to make it hurt.

“. . . .you always look good to me, Shiro. You have for the longest time now.”

“Are you saying you want to kiss me?”

“And what would you do if I did?”

The yellow in Shiro’s eyes flickers like candlelight, brushing against his pupils as a lover’s touch, a gentle caress enveloping until there’s a second ring circling solidly around the black of them.

“Try me.”

Keith snorts out a laugh at that, rough and disbelieving. His hands go dead-in-the-water still. “Another time.”

*

Every time they meet, Keith notes their growing proximity. Inches at first, then a foot, and another, and another. Shiro claiming space by the fractions, but to Keith, it feels like he had leapt the distance between stars with each millimeter taken, and it has his heart frantic at the possibility that not everything is as lost as Reason had claimed.

_You’re good, Keith. Too good to go giving up before you even really tried._

Tonight, Shiro is sitting just opposite him in the cell, close enough that he can feel the fabric of Shiro’s shirt against his shoulder as they both lean up against the bars. Close enough that their fingers sit side-by-side, and as Keith notices the chill creeping into his from the floor he wonders idly if Shiro’s fingers can tell the difference at all. If Galra tech was that sophisticated - _this is cold, this is scalding, this is the warmth of everything you have ever once loved._.

“Your hair gets completely messed up when we’re in bed. . .”

Shiro tips his head against the bars. Keith doesn’t look up, instead letting his gaze linger on their hands, on the inch-turned-chasm that separates their fingers. 

“Not that you have a lot of it, what with that hack job in the back, but your bangs always puff up and spike out after we’ve. . .”

The words jam up in his throat. His heart collapses beneath the last memory he has of that with them. At Shiro beneath him, with that undone sort of smile so satisfied with itself it doesn’t know how to rightly put itself together, so part of his mouth is always hitched a little higher than the other and Keith can practically see the laugh that wants to jump from Shiro’s tongue. Whether it's the sweetest bit of love making Keith has never thought himself worthy of or the roughest burn-it-all-out sort of fuck that overcomes them in the wake of one battle or another, there’s always something like laughter plaguing Shiro in the aftermath. Because happiness can be that indescribable and a heart can weigh that heavy. So, he smiles and he laughs, and he puts his hands on Keith like he's the finest chalice worth drinking from and pulls him right down to him, each and every time. 

The last time those hands had been on his hips, and his cheeks had been burning because Shiro had had the audacity to tell him – 

“You’re absolutely beautiful.”

Keith hears shattering in the back of his mind, a window pane brought to its demise by the unexpected. His lips part, but the sound has fled his throat, and there is nothing but emptiness sitting on his tongue. A touch ghosts along his hand, fingers tentative as they slide across his knuckles, as they reach for his wrist and encircle it. 

He swallows down the pain like the bitter pill it is and turns his gaze on Shiro. 

“Isn’t that what I told you?”

The yellow of Shiro’s eyes has receded to a thin nebulous line on the outer edge of his irises. Keith spends a held-breath’s worth of time studying that look, at the faint smirk toying with Shiro’s mouth, and he wants to tell himself this is real, that there is hope, that this is the man worth cutting down his heart for. The grip around his wrist is light, inquisitive, and the part of Shiro’s lips is inviting. Keith tips his head closer.

“Yes. . .” he murmurs in answer. 

Shiro reaches through the bars with his left arm and cautiously runs his fingers across Keith’s cheek. It takes every ounce of fighter’s instinct to keep himself from leaning into that touch, and it has something screaming in his head, right around the place where glass litters the floor and blood promises to spill hot. 

“Do you remember, Shiro. . .”

The smirk wavers a little, looking for the smile it wants to be. Thumb runs across the line of his jaw, starts a slow dive down towards his neck. 

“. . . .the first time you said you loved me?” Keith finishes quietly, watching as the quintessence continues to drift thin as a star’s shadow as it shoots across the sky. 

Watches as it flares up suddenly, meteoric in its descent over the grey until nothing is left of human in Shiro’s gaze. Something shuts off the words in his throat. Panic spills into his veins. But he can’t move because Shiro has his hand anchored to the floor. Keith can feel the tears pricking sharp at his eyes seconds later as recognition hits him square in the gut. 

And still he watches Shiro, still he feels the press of fingertips against his throat, easing off then closing in. 

“. . .you told. . .” he manages, voice crackling with pain. A breath cuts in as Shiro allows him a moment to gulp air. His fingers start to grow numb against the floor, tips tingling electric and foreign. Keith drags his other arm up and wraps his hand around Shiro’s, the one playing noose around his neck. “. . .the stars. . .”

Another breath rushes in. The world threatens to fall to darkness, a curtain call on his consciousness. 

“Shiro. . .I remember. . ."

There is a firestorm in his throat. It burns and it burns, devouring his breath, the flicker of its flames telling him that there is everything of life for him here, that all he has ever wanted can find itself again and it is sitting there, waiting for him to dig his hands into the black of this world and pull it free once more.

"I still. . .”

He can barely hear his voice, but the words are there, broken and defiant. And his gaze holds to Shiro’s as the yellow falters, falling back to its waveform pattern, crashing again and again against Shiro’s pupils. 

“. .. love you. . .”

Words bought with faith’s dying breath. 

Keith thinks the world has put iron into his bones, sand in his veins. One second everything hurts, on the next nothing does, every bit of him razed down to a foundation of ash. There are lights swimming in his vision, deep-sea monsters that flicker in the blackness and threaten to take him whole once he succumbs. And there is fear in Shiro’s gaze, and there is something monstrous about that too because Keith doesn’t remember seeing anything like it in Shiro’s eyes before this moment.

He wants to laugh. He does. But he’s too busy trying to breathe because suddenly his throat has access to the air around him. It's searing its way down into his lungs with all the ferocity of a life renewed, and everything is full of pain, and it is wonderful in a way Keith has never known his existence to be. 

“Keith. . .I. . .I’m so-“

He knows that voice, even if he doesn’t know the horror in it or the way it trembles and cracks like ice before the first steps of spring. He breathes in again; fingertips glide hesitant across his cheek. A touch questioning how best to commit. When Shiro’s hand threatens to retreat, Keith clamps his own down over it. Because there are stormclouds gathering in Shiro’s irises, dark and uncertain, and there is nothing of lightning in their depths. Just grey turned far too human. Laughter finally breaks free as Keith slumps forward against the bars. 

“Welcome home, Shiro. . .”


End file.
